The Bible and the American Nation
It was an unfortunate day for a Mr. Ruggles when on Sept. 2, 1810, he imbibed too freely at Salem, New York and did “wickedly, maliciously and blasphemously utter, and with a loud voice” blasphemous words against the Christian religion. His case finally came before Chancellor James Kent and the New York Supreme Court where his penalty by a lower court of $500 with three month’s imprisonment was upheld. In handing down his historic decision Judge Kent saw important legal reasons for upholding Christianity.
Citing a previous case of Rex vs. Woolston the Chancellor declared that “whatever strikes at the root of Christianity tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil government.” He saw the need of protecting the Christian religion as of immense value to the American republic. “We stand equally in need, now as formerly,” he declared, “of all the moral discipline, and of those principles of virtue, which help to bind society together. The people of this state, in common with the people of this country, profess the general doctrine of Christianity, as the rule of their faith and practice; and to scandalize the author of these doctrines, is not only in a religious point of view, extremely impious, but, even in respect to the obligation due to society, is a gross violation of decency and good order.” In concluding, the Court stated that it had no objection to any one’s religious opinions, but regarded the profanation of Christ another matter. This offense, it declared, “strikes at the root of moral obligation and weakens the security of social ties.”
It is an axiom with Constitutional historians that Court decisions reflect contemporary thought; consequently, while Judge Kent’s decision would be an anomaly in today’s America, it displays how thoroughly the United States, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, imbibed the general principles of Christianity. It is indeed questionable whether the founding of the American nation, or its early progress, can be understood at all separate from the impact of the Bible upon it. When the French traveller, Alexis de Tocqueville, visited America in 1831 he could find “no country in the whole world in which the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.” Others shared his perceptive conclusion.
In a speech before the U. S. Senate in 1824 Missouri’s Senator Thomas Hart Benton reviewed the progress of the nation’s life, “civil, social and religious,” and concluded that it was one of “intellectual and moral improvement;” for “once in every week, more than eleven thousand men, eminent for learning and for piety, perform the double duty of amending the hearts, and enlightening the understandings of more than eleven thousand congregations of people.” In 1854 Philip Schaff, the German emigrant and historian, thought it remarkable that the fathers of America were all deeply religious men. He remembered that George Washington and other statesmen had thrown their weight behind religion. These men, said Schaff, “have repeatedly and emphatically declared that Christianity is the groundwork of the republic, and that the obliteration of the church must involve the annihilation of all freedom, and the ruin of the land.” Furthermore, Schaff noted that Henry Clay had said on his death-bed that he had tried the glories of earth and found them all vanity and that he sought peace and salvation only in Christ. Schaff remarked, moreover, that Daniel Webster, “the American Demosthenes, who in the grand simplicity of his style betrays the study of the Bible,” found the twenty-third Psalm consoling in his last hours and had requested his epitaph to read: “Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief.” In summary, therefore, said Schaff, “Such testimonies from such mouths, have in America the weight of a mighty sermon, and of a sacred legacy to the whole nation.”
In the general period of America’s beginning, the opinion was wide-spread that the country was destined to take its place among the greatest nations of the earth and the Christian religion would be a vital contributing factor. President Ezra Stiles of Yale College, delivered the Connecticut Election sermon in 1783 on “The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor.” Taking as his text Deuteronomy 26:19 he declared that “this will be a great, very great nation, nearly equal to half Europe. . . .” He predicted that God shall make his “American Israel high above all nations which he has made—in numbers, and in praise, and in name, and in honor.” He regarded it as truly remarkable that within eight years after the Battle of Lexington “the independence and sovereignty of the United States should be acknowledged by four European sovereignties, one of which would be Britain herself.” It is understandable that he exclaimed exuberantly, “We have seen more wonders accomplished in eight years than are usually unfolded in a century!”
The victorious struggle with England followed by the formation of the Constitution and the establishment of the nation were widely considered to be the work of Divine Providence. In his First Inaugural Address, Washington said, “No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men more than the people of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.” Always a believer in Divine Providence Washington assured the nation in his Farewell Address that God rules over the universe, presides over her councils likewise, and by his providential aid, “supplies every human defect.” The country was still very young when Alexander Campbell arrived from Ireland in 1810 but he was deeply impressed with the new political, social and religious climate. He wrote back to his uncle, Archibald, then living at Newry in North Ireland of the wonders of the new world. “No consideration that I can conceive of,” he vowed, “would induce me to exchange all that I enjoy in this country, climate, soil and government, for any situation which your country can afford. I would not exchange the honor and privilege of being an American citizen for the position of your king.”
The pilgrims who landed at Cape Cod in 1610 and the Puritans who formed the Massachusetts Bay Company and settled to the north just ten years later, had their life-patterns rooted deeply in the images, principles and laws of the Bible. “America’s roots lie deep in biblical soil, planted there from the country’s very beginning,” say Joseph Gaer and Ben Siegel. The Puritans were products of sixteenth and seventeenth century England and shared the general upheaval concomitant with the Protestant Reformation. They accepted the Bible as the word of God which in turn molded their lives, shaped their thoughts and colored their speech. Every biblical precept or sentiment was a divine command and rule of life. When their attempts to remake England along biblical lines failed, they turned their attention to America where in the primeval forests they might raise an empire for God. They were determined to combat the loneliness, hunger, cold and disease of a new world for the privilege of worshipping God according to their way of reading the Bible.
John Adams, later reflecting upon the Puritan’s coming to America, wrote in his diary in 1765, “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the elimination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.” Well indeed he might. John Cotton, upon his departure from England in 1630, preached a sermon on 2 Samuel 7:10, “Moreover, I will appoint a place tor my people Israel, and I will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own and move no more.” Cotton did not believe that God spoke directly through him but only that he created a situation in England that was intolerable, while at the same time He opened up America as a place of settlement. The Puritans transferred the Old Testament theocracy to themselves and a new Canaan. Thus they were God’s chosen, sent to fulfill a divine purpose in God’s own chosen time.
The Puritans easily discovered texts to prove to their own satisfaction that they were a new Hebrew commonwealth under Divine guidance and protection. James I was their Pharaoh, the Atlantic Ocean their Red Sea and America their Canaan. They had been driven from their homes by the King, but behind it, they saw the majesty of God working to send them across the sea. Too, since their views of the Bible were steeped in Calvinism, they saw themselves as the elect for whom God had reserved a golden destiny. As the host of Jehovah they would be invincible and their success inevitable. Thus the Bible provided the inspiration for their settlement in America.
The Puritan’s reading of the Bible guided him even further to influence the government he would establish in America. To the Puritan a church was a voluntary association composed of the elect who were gathered together by a covenant which bound them irrevocably to God, to their minister and to each other. John Robinson, an early leader, put it, “In what place soever . . . two or three faithful people do arise, separating themselves from the world into the fellowship of gospel and covenant of Abra-ham, they are a church truly gathered.” Later, on board the Mayflower, this small band drew up the Mayflower Compact to guide them upon their arrival in their new land. Following the guidelines of the church covenants, the Mayflower Compact thus transferred a church covenant into the practical foundation of a self-governing community.
Scholars who have carefully researched these early church covenants and the Mayflower Compact have long ago shown that these basic ideas, drawn, as the Puritans believed, from the Bible, helped shape the American Constitutional system. Basically, here one discovers the fundamental doctrine of separation of church and state, the idea of a covenant or contractual relationship, the assumption of individual right, the doctrine of individual liberty and the social-compact theory of the associations of many individuals into a new and vital whole and unified body. In his Foundations of American Constitutionalism Andrew McLoughlin calls this “the essence of the theory of democracy, as a system of government, and the center of free constitutionalism.”
It would not be difficult to trace in the deliberations of the Massachusetts General Court and other colonial legislative bodles the Influence of the Bible, When, for example, the New Haven General Assembly met in 1680 to draw up a government for Connecticut, they heard John Davenport urge them “to drive things,,, as near to the precept and pattern of Scripture as they could be driven,” There can be little doubt that one historian’s judgment is true: “All of us now enjoying the rights and pleasures of American religious, social, and intellectual freedom owe to those courageous, tough-minded, passionately-devout Puritans and their Bibles-an incalculable debt.” Henry Commager has pointed out that long after the doctrines of Puritanism disappeared in America, their legacy persisted, and among these were a respect for the individual and for the dignity of man, the allegiance to principles rather than to men, the doctrine of government by pact and a spiritual and moral democracy.
The Bible, however, not only inspired the founding of America and molded its political institutions, but it stimulated and guided its educational enterprises. The Puritans were close enough to the Reformation to remember that the educated mind had broken the shackles that linked men to the Catholic religion. One of the most important contributions of the Reformation was to stimulate learning. Grammar schools sprang up in every village while Hebrew and Greek took on a new importance in the universities. Leadership of early American colonization was supplied by university-trained ministers whose work was taken in Cambridge. In only six years after the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established the General Court voted a college into existence. When John Harvard bequeathed over half of his earthly possessions to the new projects, he gained an immortal fame for himself.
When Harvard College opened in 1638, the influence of the Bible provided a strong impetus. The purpose of the school was to “advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity,” Among the motives prompting the founders was their “dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.” The laws of the college stated that the instructions to the student should impress him that the “maine end of his life and studies was to know God and Jesus Christ . . . and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.” Only a burning desire to serve God and to provide posterity with a greater knowledge of God drove men to sacrifice for the school. Within a few years the Anglicans established William and Mary College in Virginia with similar guidelines while the Congregationalists did the same in Connecticut by founding Yale. By the end of the Colonial era the Atlantic seaboard was heavily dotted with schools, and almost all were stimulated by religious elements, who drew their inspiration from the Bible.
The nation’s indebtedness to the Bible, moreover, may be seen in the moral and spiritual threads which it wove into society. Robert Baird, the nation’s first church historian, wrote in 1844 “that notwithstanding the purely legalistic character of the constitutions, there was an indestructible link between the political institutions and the thrust of American religiosity.” Gruff old Josh Wilson, Cincinnati’s colorful Presbyterian minister, expressed the wide-spread belief that “the happiness of ourselves and posterity depends much, yea altogether, upon true religion and morality, of course every restraint that is taken from vice, and every toleration that is given to break the moral law is a direct infringement upon the happiness of our country.” When Robert Owen proposed to establish his New Harmony Utopia by ignoring the Bible, Alexander Campbell cautioned him that it was yet to be demonstrated that a society could be moral without the Christian religion, which is another way of saying without the Bible.
Biblically-based morality, as de Tocqueville and others observed, ran the whole gamut of American life. The perceptive Frenchman found that many Americans agreed that its influence on politics was enormous. The fact that the nation’s statesmen so often turned their attention to humanitarian causes, to prison reform, to charity and to relief for those who suffered in natural disasters reflected the influence the Bible had on their lives. Moreover, the fact that voters would insist upon office-holders displaying the highest probity and be champions of noble principles not only established rapport between political officials and the masses, but elevated the nation’s political system and stems historically from the moral influences of the Scriptures on society in general.
The extent to which religion permeated the nation in early America may be illustrated by the tenaciousness with which they held to the observance of the “Sabbath.” The Puritans, with their penchant for the Old Testament, used the word to mean Sunday or the first day of the week, but they gave it its typical Hebrew legalistic meaning. No word was more often on their lips than this one, because it came to be the ultimate test of loyalty to God, by their standards. Most American ministers watched their public officials carefully to see that they did observe their legalistic rules, for to break the Sabbath would bring down the anger of God upon the whole nation. For example, Ezra Stiles Ely, Moderator for the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, wrote Andrew Jackson on January 28, 1829 to caution the new president on the proper observance of the “Sabbath” on his trip to Washington to assume office. Ely wrote, “I feel confident that both your sense of duty and your desire to gratify a numerous class of your firm supporters, would prevent you from publicly travelling on the Lord’s Day except in a case of mercy and necessity. If ascending a river in a boat, you would of course, and with propriety, proceed on it: but when on land, if the stage of Monday would carry you in reason to the place of destination, I feel confident that you would set an example of resting on the day previous.”
By today’s standards such a letter seems both crude and ignorant, but in Jackson’s day, it reflected a sincere concern that the nation progress by following the moral and spiritual guidelines laid down in the Bible.
Early America was concerned about the future of the new republic. The first U. S. Senate, in reply to Washington’s inaugural address, acknowledged that in review, the circumstances and combination of causes that led to the successful termination of the Revolutionary War and the establishment of the American government had led them “un-avoidably to acknowledge and adore the Great Arbiter of the Universe by whom empires rise and fall, and to admit that they saw many instances of the favor of God in the processes of establishing the republic. To this Washington replied that Heaven would not withdraw its influence “before our political felicity shall have been completed.”
After ten years in America, Philip Schaff came to have “an elevated sense of the vast importance of America for the destiny of mankind.” Viewing America against the background of European countries, he, too, believed that “Providence has evidently prepared the country and the nation for the greatest work, and no power on earth can arrest its progress and prosperity, if we are true to our call-ing, if we fear God and love righteousness, mindful of the maxim—’No liberty without virtue; no virtue without religion; no religion with Christianity; Christianity, the safeguard of our republic and hope of the world.”
Thus biblical principles operated in the founding of the nation, in selecting its constitution and political institutions, in guiding her educational enterprises, in shaping her moral complexion and in making her people aware of their continuing responsibility to God. These divine precepts, woven like a golden thread through the fabric of the nation, have enabled it to stand unique and proud among the nations of the world.
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Earl Irvin West (1920-2011) attended Freed-Hardeman University, Abilene Christian University, and Pepperdine University (B.A.), Butler University (B.D.), and received Ph. D. (History) at Indiana University. He preached for over 40 years in Indianapolis, authored a five volume series, Search for the Ancient Order, wrote extensively for Gospel Advocate and other journals, and taught at Harding University and Harding Graduate School.